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Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

The mainstream media and President Obama have made a considerable issue out of the dissemination of fake news leading up to the election, even going so far as to hint that Donald Trump’s victory might have been owed in part to the work of the fakers. On cue, The Washington Post recently published a story citing anonymous sources that claimed the fake news was the product of Russian propaganda. Yet Fortune magazine concluded that the Post’s “analysis was fairly weak,” and “Much of [the evidence] seems flimsy at best.” That didn’t stop the Post from blaming Russian propaganda, based on biased evidence and anonymous sources.

As AIM’s Cliff Kincaid recently explained, Facebook and Google are looking to create an algorithm that eliminates fake news on their websites. To do so is to risk disproportionate discrimination against information from outside the mainstream, including conservative and left-wing blogs, points out The Hill. “Critics also charge that the ‘fake news’ trope obscures the fact that the mainstream media have their own problem with false or misleading stories,” writes Cathy Young in The Hill. Kincaid also cites something called the First Draft Coalition, a sort of Ministry of Truth comprised of media organizations that we are supposed to trust to produce content free of fake news.

In fact, many of these so-called reputable news organizations are responsible for what is perhaps the fake news story of the decade. The story involves one of President Obama’s major foreign policy legacies, the Iran nuclear “deal.”

For about a year now, we have been pointing out that the Iranian nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran, is in fact, not a deal at all. There is an English language version, which the American public has seen (except for the side deals that were kept hidden from Congress and the American public). Also, there is an Iranian version passed in their Majlis, or parliament, which is considerably different.

On June 29, the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB) held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington to discuss the release of its new report on the events surrounding the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the Special Mission Compound and CIA Annex, resulting in the deaths of four Americans. As usual, the liberal media largely stayed away. Apparently, if The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press and NBC don’t cover a story, no matter how important, it isn’t really news. So instead, the only representative from the mainstream media was The Washington Post’s designated hit man, Dana Milbank, who regularly trolls conservative gatherings to heap scorn, sarcasm and peddle misinformation to his waiting readers. That is the sad state of journalism in this country today.

Mr. Milbank’s penchant for playing fast and loose with the details has gotten him in trouble before, when he claimed that conservative speakers had “taunted” a young Muslim girl. These speakers had, in fact, thanked her for her presence. In the latest case, Milbank wrote an opinion piece, not a news story, with the online headline, “Benghazi Conspiracy Theorists Turn on Trey Gowdy.” The headline in the print edition of the paper was “Appeasing the far right? You’ll always end up wrong.”

During the course of Milbank’s article, he called the members of the CCB “a coalition of far-right ­foreign-policy types,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “agitators.” This is all part of the attempt to discredit the messenger, because Milbank can’t really dispute the message—although he has certainly tried. But at least he was there, and spelled the names correctly, though he was wrong about the number of members on the commission (it’s 14, plus two advisory, not 11). Apparently the Post’s Fact-Checker was busy on other stories that day. Maybe they should hire more.

Milbank found our report to be what he called “full of inventive accusations.”

“They found ‘troubling evidence that Obama and Clinton were deeply and knowingly involved in running guns to al-Qaeda in Libya,’” writes Milbank, “as well as ‘a clear case of official U.S. government submission to the Islamic Law on slander.’”

“They determined that the Obama administration ‘switched sides in what was then called the Global War on Terror’ and ‘benefited this country’s worst enemies,’” he continues. “They wrote that Clinton herself blocked U.S. military forces from attempting a rescue mission, and they attributed the decision to oust Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in part to financial interests of the Clinton Foundation.”

The willful blindness of the Western media and intellectual elites to Palestinian incitement and their hyper-focus on any incident they can use to portray Israel in a negative light were on abundant display last week when footage emerged of an Israel Defense Forces soldier shooting a wounded and disarmed Palestinian terrorist.

Since then, The New York Times and The Washington Post have run no fewer than 16 stories about the incident. This volume of coverage reinforces the patently mendacious Israel-is-evil “narrative” promoted by the mainstream media, the liberal elites in bed with Palestinian and jihadist killers, the demonstrably one-sided United Nations, and the sanctimonious rants of several congressional leaders who claim they are speaking out in the name of human rights.

Meanwhile, these same news outlets consistently fail to speak out against the massive and ongoing denial of human rights, suppression of basic freedoms and daily torture meted out to any Palestinian dissident by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Many of these violations have been investigated and documented in horrific detail by the courageous Palestinian human rights advocate Bassam Eid.

The mainstream media are content with giving Mrs. Clinton a pass on her many scandals, downplaying or minimizing information that could potentially damage her campaign. At the same time, media organizations work to bolster her air of inevitability as the chosen candidate by repeatedly drawing attention to the size of her lead in terms of the number of delegates she and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) each have.

After voting in 19 states, the latest delegate count shows Hillary Clinton with 1,130 delegates to 499 for Sanders. But those numbers could be misleading. Clinton has among her delegates 458 superdelegates, meaning elected officials and party officials who can vote for whomever they want, and who comprise about 30 percent of the total number of delegates needed to win the nomination. They have announced that they will vote for her, while just 22 superdelegates have declared support for Sanders. Superdelegates were established after the 1972 election in which Democratic candidate George McGovern won just one state, in order to give the party establishment a better chance to control the nominating process and avoid a repeat of that situation.

It is important to remember, however, that in December 2007 candidate Barack Obama had only 63 superdelegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 169. Yet in 2008 President Obama won the Democratic presidential primary with 463 superdelegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 257. Superdelegates are usually inclined to lend their vote to the candidate who is already winning.

It is no wonder that media reports emphasize Mrs. Clinton’s electability over Sanders. After all, the liberal media have put the full force of their reporting behind ensuring her campaign’s success, even though Sanders is making a surprisingly strong showing so far, having won eight of the 19 states that have held primaries or caucuses. He clearly has the enthusiasm factor going for him.

But the Clinton camp has other things to worry about as well. Bryan Pagliano, who set up Mrs. Clinton’s private email server at the start of her time as secretary of state, recently was granted immunity by the Justice Department. National Review’s Andy McCarthy notes that a “proffer agreement signals that an active grand-jury investigation may well be underway, and if it is not yet underway, it soon will be.”

The liberal media avoid reporting on President Obama’s many scandals[1] at any cost, and Fast and Furious is no exception. Despite the media’s studied avoidance of these scandals, their impact continues. When Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents discovered that a weapon from Fast and Furious was found in Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Mexican hideout, there was virtual silence from the mainstream media.

But U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling that President Obama cannot use executive privilege to prevent the release of records to Congress has the potential to breathe new life into this ongoing scandal. “Berman Jackson limited her order to information not covered by other protections and told the Justice Department to produce it by Feb. 2,” reports[2] Bloomberg. The judge is an Obama appointee, and yet none of the network evening news shows found this story to be newsworthy. The only mention of it in The Washington Post was in an online blog, PowerPost, under the heading “Hot on the Right,” that linked to a Politico story. You see, it’s a story that only appeals to conservatives, so why bother to put a reporter on it?

The mainstream media cannot stand that the film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, in depicting the violence in Benghazi and the heroism of the Global Response Staff (GRS), has a straightforward common-sense message. Instead, reporters like Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post see fit to mock that heroism, and even suggest that President Obama’s latest appeasement to Iran deserves equal Hollywood fame.

“But, as Secretary of State John F. Kerry secured the release of American prisoners in Iran just hours after ‘13 Hours’ opened, the movie’s simplistic, shooting-good-talking-bad moral scheme began to ring impressively false,” arguesHornaday. “Maybe one day, State Department envoy Brett McGurk, who led the team that negotiated the release, will get his own big-screen blockbuster, even if it doesn’t feature prominent biceps, heavy ordnance and a careening SUV with its wheels on fire.”

A key message of 13 Hours, and the Benghazi scandal, is that the GRS’s gun-toting heroism wouldn’t have been necessary if President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hadn’t been derelict in their duty to secure the U.S. Special Mission Compound beforehand, or to provide military support to the Americans once the shooting started.

Now it appears some among the Climate Summit’s host-nation French media were just as outraged by Barack Obama’s glaringly ignorant commentary regarding how mass shootings only happen in the United States – and said those words while standing on a stage in Paris less than two weeks after that city saw hundreds of its citizens gunned down and blown up by Muslim terrorists in a mass shooting attack.